luke/transience's 2010 listens -- part 1 of however many

Hello everyone - long time no write. I haven't been too active on the music front lately, so I'm going to try and condense the last eight weeks of luke into one succinct blog post.

Dessa - A Badly Broken Code
Genre: trip hop, hip hop



This seems to be the Jukebox's album of the year so far. I don't think any of us are completely in love with it, but all of us like it a lot. Dessa reminds me of a female version of Sage Francis for some reason. She blends singing and rap in a way that's reminiscent of old trip hop, but she is undeniably a rap artist. I like that she isn't one of those female rappers that try really hard to show off how hardcore she is. She's content to just sing/rap about a broken relationship or use her intelligent writing to her advantage. This is the first I've heard of her so I may need to swim around in her back catalogue. God knows I don't have a lot of female hip hop!

The Antlers - Hospice
Genre: indie, music to kill yourself to



I'm about six months late to the Hospice party -- probably because the name of the band is The Antlers and who the hell wants to listen to a band named that -- but it finally clicked with me today. This album is equal parts brutal and beautiful - it is heartwrenchingly sad at times and then oddly inspiring. I'm not sure that 2009 had an album that stood out quite like Hospice. It took me ten listens to even decide if I liked it or loved it. The answer is love.

The Knife - Tomorrow, In a Year
Genre: opera, electronic, fucking weird



Wow. This album is bizarre. Silent Shout was one of the best records to come out in 2006 and the much-anticipated follow-up to it is a concept opera about Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species. It is torturous to listen to at times. There's five minutes of a droning sound, two minutes devoted of a high-pitched beep that makes you want to cover your ears, and some of the strangest opera singing around. It is the kind of album that most bands don't recover from: once they jump off the deep end, there's no going back to the land of normal. The album gets a little bit more Knife-y by the end of it, but at that point it's already past the point of no return.

And yet, there's something bizarrely enticing about this disc. It is fascinating in its own strange way. I find myself listening to it and wondering how the hell they made it, and then when it ends I find myself grateful that my ears are not being pummeled anymore.

Why? Alopecia
Genre: indie rock/emo jewish hip hop



The album I listened to the most in 2009 is the album that should have been my 2008 album of the year, Alopecia. For some bizarre reason I just can not stop listening to Alopecia. Yoni Wolf's brutal honesty and clever as hell wordplay just keeps me coming back over and over and over. It's addicting. I think this album is very close to being my favourite album of all time at this point. I even hooked my girlfriend/fiance/whatever on it recently which makes me like it even more. I need to find a way to stop listening to this before I get sick of it.

Massive Atack - heligoland
Genre: lounge-hop



I was afraid to listen to this album. You see, Massive Attack really defined music in the 90s, first with the seminal Blue Lines and then with one of the best sounding discs of all time, Mezzanine. You couldn't talk about trip hop without somebody mentioning Massive Attack. It was impossible.

Then the 2000s happened and Massive Attack has been irrelevant ever since. 100th Window, while a decent album, never hits the highs of previous albums and while their recent EP was interesting, it wasn't top tier material. heligoland follows this trend of being merely average and therefore extremely disappointing. Massive Attack is a great band that I have great expectations for; when they come up short and merely put out an average album, it's almost worse than not putting out anything at all, especially seeing how this album took seven years to make. I find it hard to imagine a time where Massive Attack is relevant again - time has just passed them by, I think.

RJD2 - The Colossus
genre: instrumental rock, jazz, hip hop



Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. This is one of the most frustrating albums of all time.

At first, it's really cool, a varied instrumental album that manages to make you forget about how bad The Third Hand was. Kenna is an old fave of mine and does and his voice fits in well with RJ's instrumentation. The album stagnates a bit as it goes on, but considering how low he set the bar after The Third Hand, it's tolerable.

And then track 9 happens.



Four minutes later, you're reminded of how good RJD2 used to be and how he used to completely own the world of instrumental hip-hop. It doesn't help that Illogic is one of my favourite guys in the world of hip-hop. Suddenly he's invalidated the whole album by daring to compare it to Dead Ringer. It's not even close to being as good, but that doesn't even matter. RJD2 is officially a tease. RJD2, I hate you.